With rising sea levels, much of the island of Catan is under water. Increase your resource productivity by using windmills to reclaim the lost land.

A fan-made scenario from the Netherlands.

• 18 x Windmill tokens (three in each colour)

This scenario requires the base game and seafarers. For up to 6 players.

Set-up

Build the board using 3 of every resource tile and placing them randomly in the appropriate white hexes as shown in the Windmills map.

From the Seafarers expansion, take the land hexes (excluding the ore and desert hexes), shuffle them and randomly select 9 hexes face down so you do not know what they are. Place these tiles upside down on the gray spaces shown in the Windmill map. These are shallow water spaces, that will be able to be claimed. For older games, place a frame of alternating water and harbour hexes around the board. If you have a modern game with a frame place sea all around the outside and then place harbour tokens only on the outer edges - ie not in the space between the grey and white borders in the diagram.

From the base game, take the numbers 5, 2, 6, 3, 8, 10, 6, 12, 9, 4, 8, 10, 9, 4, 5 and place them either as shown in the diagram or randomly on the revealed tiles if preferred. Use the Seafarers numbers for the reclaimed tiles amnd randomly place nine numbers face down on the grey hexes.

All players receive three windmills of the appropriate color.

Scenario Rules

This scenario follows all the standard rules and Seafarers rules with the following additions:

• Players may build ships around unrevealed (upside down) tiles in order to build a windmill.
• During the build phase, a player may build a windmill at the cost of 1 clay and 1 lumber on any unrevealed tile that is completely surrounded by roads and/or ships. Once one turn has passed and after resolving the dice roll, turn the tile over and number counter over to revreal.
• Any ships that were used to surround the tile must be placed on their side and are now beached. They now act as roads/ Any ships that still touch a sea hex or are adjacent to an unrevealed hex remain ships and can be moved away using normal ship movements).
• The windmill remains on the tile since continuous pumping is required to keep the land dry. For that reason, players can only claim a limited number of land tiles from the sea (maximum of three windmills per player).

OPTIONAL RULE

• Maintaining Windmills requires constant maintenance. Owners of a Windmill must pay one random resource during their turn. If you own multiple windmills it is still only one resource per turn and not one resource per windmill.
• If a Windmill owner cannot afford the maintenance the windill is lost and the hex reverts to being flooded (turn hex upside down).
• Any roads or settlements that no longer adjoin a land hex on any oborder are destroyed. Any beached ships now become standard ships again.
• Any player adjoining the flooded hex can now reclaim the hex by building a new Windmill.
• If the robber is on a hex that reverts to water it remains there until next moved as per the rules. The robber is a good swimmer and is not afraid of water.

The first player to earn 10 Victory Points wins the game.

Copyright: George van Voorn

This scenario was found in a collection I acquired from the Netherlands. As well as using the standard tokens supplied, I enjoy the scenario so much I quickly painted some windmills I bought online to help enhance our 3D games (see below).